Tag: pandemic

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Sundance Film Festival 11 – Video Games In The Spotlight

It’s that time of the year again. What time you ask? The time of year when aspiring film makers get together at one of North America’s great indie scene movie festivals, the annual Sundance Film Festival to be more precise. Hosted in Salt Lake City, Utah, it’s every hopeful movie-maker’s dream to succeed at this event. Many of today’s biggest Hollywood film makers had their humble beginnings at this prestigious festival, amongst which are Steven Soderbergh and Quinton Tarantino. Some of the movies which gained fame at this festival are The Blair Witch Project, Little Miss Sunshine, Reservoir Dogs, SAW, and Napoleon Dynamite.

From 20 to 31 January 2011 we saw some truly inspiring work come from this popular movie outing, but for the purpose of this article we will look at a topic which is close to our hearts – video games. Yes, the 2011 Sundance Film Festival boasted with quite a few video game-themed projects and even a panel where members of the press (and public) could interact with the writers of such games as Alan Wake and Uncharted.

So it would seem that video games are really in focus for independent film makers. We have collected a trio of video game short films to show what talent we can expect from the future film-makers of Hollywood. Have a look at them after the jump.

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Flash Games

Panic Stations! It’s The Great Flu Game!

In recent weeks we’ve come into contact with someone who knows someone who knows someone who has the swine flu. And now the pandemic has spread to the digital world. In an effort to raise more awareness, Dutch researchers and Ranj Serious Games have created The Great Flu, a video game where you play as a member for the fictitious World Pandemic Control Agency desperately trying to control the spread of a deadly virus.

“It is actually what is happening now, what is happening in the real world,” said Albert Osterhaus, head of virology at the Erasmus Medical Center, who designed “The Great Flu” game with colleagues.

Watch the intro video below.

Pick a strain (each colour has its own difficulty rating) and jump straight into the game. The display lets you see how many people are infected, keep tabs on your budget, navigate the world map (20 regions), and react to global events and messages. You have variety of tools available to fight an outbreak, but choosing the appropriate course isn’t necessarily the easiest. Your budget is limited too –  I spent my money with reckless abandon, and that had, um, fatal consequences.

Play the simulator at www.thegreatflu.com.

[via Kotaku]

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Cautionary Tales

The Pigs Strike Back, Swine Flu on The Loose

If pigs belonged to a shadowy brotherhood, they’d be laughing their trotters off right now. We live in very interesting times with marvels in science and technology happening every day. And now you can add to that list a never-before-seen mixture of viruses from swine, birds, and humans.

Swine flu is a respiratory disease, caused by influenza type A which typically infects pigs. It hasn’t normally infected humans, but the latest form can spread from person to person, and with that the potential to spark a global pandemic.

The new strain has killed up to 149 people in Mexico, infected 50 in the United States, six in Canada, two each in Spain and Scotland, with New Zealand and Israel confirming cases of swine flu today. As a result the World Health Organization has raised its alert level to phase 4, indicating the virus is becoming increasingly adept at spreading among humans. Phase 6 is the highest alert level where the virus spreads to another country in a different region and the global pandemic is under way.

Keep up-to-date with Reuters’ global coverage of the swine flu.